This morning the first official image from The Dark Knight Rises was revealed — an image of Tom Hardy as Bane! Yesterday Warner Bros. announced the beginning of production on the film via press release, and many fans on the forums speculated that the launch of the film’s official website www.thedarkknightrises.com was bound to be next — and so they were right. The site is seemingly just a black image with an embedded audio file playing odd chanting. It seems that a fan over at SuperHeroHype took a look at the visual spectrum of that audio file and embedded in it was the Twitter hashtag #thefirerises. Upon tweeting the hashtag, each person’s twitter icon was assembled to reveal the image of Bane on the site. Click on the image below to check out the hi-res image of Bane below:

So there he is, folks; Tom Hardy as Bane. What do you think? I think it’s pretty great. It’s an intimidating image, and I’m curious as to the mask’s purpose. If you have a Twitter account, log on and retweet our latest tweet, or create your own tweet with the hashtag #thefirerises and have your Twitter icon added to the Bane image.